Bangladesh is terrorized by Islamic terrorism. Islamic terrorism has created a culture of fear in Bangladesh. Our main objective is to bring out the nation from this culture of fear. Afghanistan is noted with the notion that "a nation at war and some time a nation engulfed by the "Taliban".

In 1990s, 70,000 to 120,000 Muslim youth trained to fight in Asia, Africa, and in Middle East in different Al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda highly trained a notable number of Islamic groups and indoctrinated them with the mission of "Jihad" that influx all over the world the message of fear and violence.

Arakan Rohingya Nationalist Organization (ARNO) and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) were among the groups who were trained in Afghanistan camps and were and are active in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Every single Islamic terrorist attack from 9/11 to Bangladesh or else where in world is direct or indirect curse of the mushroom growth of Islamic terrorism. Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami-Bangladesh (HuJI-B) and Jamaat-ul-Mujaihdeen Bangladesh (JMB) have had a strong relation with the Afghanistan based Islamic terrorist networks. Bangladesh witnessed a mass bloodshed in the name of bloody Islam. Roads of Bangladesh were shacked with the slogan “We are Taliban and Bangla Will be Afghan”.

Bangladesh is experiencing the highest challenge in controlling political Islam and Islamic terrorism. The scenario has changed now Bangladesh becomes the highest threat before world peace and security.

As a multifaceted phenomenon, terrorism is a reason to fight regionally and jointly. The experience of Afghanistan in fighting the Islamic terrorism has been pivotal. Afghanistan can lead the south Asia in fighting the Islamic terrorism with their all experience.

Present Afghanistan Government and the people of Afghanistan is major ally of the International community in fighting the Islamic terrorist. The articulation and pursuit of Afghan foreign policy had made it clear the intention and ability to defend the Islamic Terrorism in or by Afghanistan. However, in a world of diversity, the solution we are looking forward to bring an end to the culture of fear and violence does demand a regional united effort.

International community should guide to bridge the gap between inadequate aspirations of Afghanistan’s foreign policy in fighting the Islamic Terrorist with People and government of Bangladesh based on the spirit of friendship and co operation.

International community should inspire the politicians and policy makers to mobilize the people of the south Asian region to make an open platform that the normal people can lead the movement against the culture of violence and fear that the movements become people’s movement against Islamic Terrorism and a vibrant campaign for Justice and peace. This initiative will play a central role in helping the people and government of Afghanistan and Bangladesh in their mission towards insuring stability of the south Asian region and the world.

William Gomes is an independent human rights activist, a Catholic ecumenical activist, and a political analyst. He is also the Executive Director of the Christian Development Alternative (CDA), a national organization against torture and human rights violations.

In the 1990s, 70,000 to 120,000 Muslim youths trained in different Al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan for fighting Jihad in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Al-Qaeda trained notable numbers of Islamic groups and indoctrinated them with the mission of “Jihad”. These trained cadres then fanned out all over the world to propagate the doctrine of violent Jihad and terrorism, and create atmosphere of terror and fear.

The Arakan Rohingya Nationalist Organization (ARNO) and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) were also among the groups that were trained in Afghanistan and have been active in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
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Among the more than 60 videotapes that the American cable television network CNN obtained from al-Qaeda's archives in Afghanistan in August this year, one marked "Burma" (Myanmar) purports to show Muslim "allies" training in that country. While the group shown, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), was founded by Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar's Rakhine State and claims to be fighting for autonomy or independence for its people, the tape was, in fact, shot in Bangladesh.

The RSO, and other Rohingya factions, have never had any camps inside Myanmar, only across the border in Bangladesh. The camp in the video is located near the town of Ukhia, southeast of Cox's Bazaar, and not all of the RSO's "fighters" are Rohingyas from Myanmar.

The Rohingyas, who are Muslims and speak the same language as the population in the Chittagong area of Bangladesh, are not regarded by the government in Yangon as an indigenous race. Hundreds of thousands of them fled across the border to Bangladesh during a crackdown in 1978, and militant groups soon emerged among the refugees. The UN eventually intervened, and most of the Rohingyas were repatriated to Myanmar. However, in 1991 and 1992, another wave of 250,000 refugees came across the border, and while most of them have also been repatriated, more than 20,000 remain in United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) supervised camps southeast of Cox's Bazaar. An estimated 100,000 Rohingyas live outside the UNHCR's camps, and it is among these destitute and stateless people that various Islamist militant groups have found fertile ground for recruitment.

The RSO was set up in the early 1980s when radical elements among the Rohingyas broke away from the more moderate main grouping, the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF). Led by a medical doctor from Arakan, Muhammad Yunus, it soon became the main and most militant faction among the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and on the border. Given its more rigid religious stand, the RSO soon secured the support of like-minded groups in the Muslim world. These included the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) in Jammu and Kashmir, and Angkatan Belia Islam sa-Malaysia (ABIM) - the Islamic Youth Organization of Malaysia. Afghan instructors have been seen in some of the RSO camps along the Bangladesh-Burma border, while nearly 100 RSO rebels were reported to have undergone training in the Afghan province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen.

The RSO's main military camp was located near the hospital that the Rabitat-al-Aalam-al-Islami had built at Ukhia. At this stage, the RSO acquired a substantial number of Chinese-made RPG-2 rocket launchers, light machine-guns, AK-47 assault rifles, claymore mines and explosives from private arms dealers in the Thai town of Aranyaprathet near the border with Cambodia, which in the 1980s emerged as a major arms bazaar for guerrilla movements in the region. These weapons were siphoned off from Chinese arms shipments to the resistance battling the Vietnamese army in Cambodia, and sold to any one who wanted, and could afford, to buy them.

The Bangladeshi media gave extensive coverage to the RSO buildup along the border, but it soon became clear that it was not only Rohingyas who were undergoing training in its camps. Many, it turned out, were members of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the youth organization of Bangladesh's Jamaat-e-Islami, and came from the University of Chittagong, where a "campus war" was being fought between Islamist militants and more moderate student groups. The RSO was, in fact, engaged in little or no fighting inside Myanmar.

It is unclear when the now-famous videotape was shot, but it presumably dates from the early 1990s, since by the late 1990s the RSO's training camps southeast of Cox's Bazaar were taken over by Bangladeshi Islamist militants. Bangladesh's main militant outfit, the Hakrat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), was formed in 1992, allegedly with financial support from Osama bin Laden himself. HuJI now has an estimated strength of 15,000 followers and is led by Shawkat Osman aka Maulana or Sheikh Farid in Chittagong. Its members were recruited mainly from students of Bangladesh's more than 60,000 madrassas (religious schools) and called themselves the Bangladeshi Taliban. The group has become notorious for masterminding violent attacks on Bangladesh's Hindu minority, as well as on moderate Bangladeshi Muslims. In a statement released by the US State Department on May 21, 2002, HuJI was described as a terrorist organization with ties to Islamist militants in Pakistan.

The existence of firm links between the new Bangladeshi militants and al-Qaeda is established through Fazlul Rahman, leader of the "Jihad Movement in Bangladesh" (to which the HuJI belongs), when he signed the official declaration of jihad against the United States on February 23, 1998. Other signatories included bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (leader of the Jihad Group in Egypt), Rifa'i Ahmad Taha aka Abu-Yasir (Egyptian Islamic Group) and Sheikh Mir Hamzah (secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan).

HuJI sent its own people, as well as Rohingya recruits, to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Rohingyas, especially, were given the most dangerous tasks in the battlefield, clearing mines and portering. According to intelligence sources, Rohingya recruits were paid 30,000 Bangladeshi taka (US$525) on joining and then 10,000 taka per month. The families of recruits killed in action were offered 100,000 taka. (While these appear to be small sums in dollar terms, they are princely amounts in a country where the annual per capita income works out to a bare $380.) Recruits were taken mostly via Nepal to Pakistan, where they were trained and sent on to military camps in Afghanistan. It is not known how many people from this part of Bangladesh - Rohingyas and others - fought in Afghanistan, but the number is believed to be quite substantial. Others have gone to Kashmir and even Chechnya to join forces with Islamist militants there.

In an interview with the CNN in December 2001, American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh relates that the al-Qaeda-directed Ansar (Companions of the Prophet) Brigades, to which he had belonged in Afghanistan, were divided along linguistic lines: Bengali, Pakistani (Urdu) and Arabic, which suggests that the Bengali-speaking component - Bangladeshi and Rohingya - must have been significant. It is now also becoming clear that some militants fleeing the American strikes in Afghanistan in late 2001 have ended up in Bangladesh. With the heavy American presence in Pakistan, many militants who fled Afghanistan in October and November 2001 have found it safer to hide in third countries. In early 2002, a ship reportedly sailed from Karachi to Chittagong carrying assorted militants from Afghanistan.

On May 10-11 2002, nine Islamist fundamentalist groups, including HuJI, met at a camp near Ukhia South and formed the Bangladesh Islamic Manch (association). The new umbrella organization includes groups purporting to represent the Rohingyas and the Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam (MULTA), a small group operating in India's northeast. By June, Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan were reported to be training members of the new alliance in at least two camps in southern Bangladesh.

An internal document from HuJI lists no less than 19 "training establishments" all over Bangladesh, but it is uncertain how many of them actually offer military training. What is certain, however, is that since a new coalition government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) took over in October 2001, Bangladesh's Islamist militants have become more vocal and active. The coalition includes, for the first time, two ministers from the Jamaat. The four-party electoral alliance that brought the new coalition government to power also includes a smaller Islamic party, the Islamic Oikya Jote, whose chairman, Azizul Huq, is a member of HuJI's advisory council.

The Bangladeshi authorities have shown no sign of being willing to crack down on these groups and their activities. On the contrary, after some adverse international publicity about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in Bangladesh earlier this year, the government cracked down on the most moderate of the Rohingya factions, the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO), in Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar. ARNO has no known links to al-Qaeda or any of Bangladesh's groups of Islamist militants. It issued a strong statement condemning the crackdown and disassociating itself from the militants. The RSO, on the other hand, was not targeted by the Bangladeshi authorities.

For many years, Bangladesh was seen as a moderate, even liberal, Muslim country. This is evidently changing, and the formation of the Bangladesh Islamic Manch in May this year clearly indicates that cooperation between the country's Islamist militants is becoming closer. The presence of trainers from Afghanistan and the arrival of more militants with al-Qaeda connections, demonstrate their participation in an international terrorist network.

Bangladesh has been terrorized by Islamic terrorists in recent years. Terrorism has created a culture of fear in Bangladesh. Our main objective must be to free the nation from this culture of fear. Afghanistan is noted with the notion that "a nation at war and some time a nation engulfed by the “Taliban”.

In the 1990s, 70,000 to 120,000 Muslim youths trained in different Al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan for fighting Jihad in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Al-Qaeda trained notable numbers of Islamic groups and indoctrinated them with the mission of “Jihad”. These trained cadres then fanned out all over the world to propagate the doctrine of violent Jihad and terrorism, and create atmosphere of terror and fear.

The Arakan Rohingya Nationalist Organization (ARNO) and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) were also among the groups that were trained in Afghanistan and have been active in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Every single Islamic terrorist attack, from 9/11 to Bangladesh or elsewhere in world, is a direct or indirect curse of the mushroom-growth of Islamic terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B) and Jamaat-ul-Mujaihdeen Bangladesh (JMB) have had a close relation with the Afghanistan-based Islamic terrorist networks. Bangladesh witnessed a significant bloodshed, particularly during the previous Islamists-allied government, in the name of Islamic Jihad. Roads of Bangladesh were shacked with the slogan “We are Taliban and Bangla Will be Afghan”.

Bangladesh is experiencing a huge challenge in controlling political Islam and Islamic terrorism. If the surging trend of Jihadi Islamic propaganda and violence is not effectively contained, Bangladesh may become a big threat to the world-peace and security.

As a multifaceted phenomenon, Islamic terrorism need to fought regionally and jointly.

The experience of fighting Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan and its ramifications can acts as a pivotal lead as to how Islamic terrorism must be fought elsewhere, particularly in neighboring South Asia.

The present Afghanistan Government and the people of Afghanistan are a major ally of the international community in fighting Islamic terrorists. Nonetheless, while articulation and pursuit of Afghan foreign policy may provide significant lead toward fighting Islamic Jihadis, in a diverse and interdependent world, a lasting solution to the culture of fear and violence, created by global Jihadi networks, demands a regional as well as global united and resolute effort.

Bangladesh faces a Afghanistan-like situation unless it undertakes effective and resolute measures urgently toward fighting and exterminating the violent Jihadi elements within the country. But it requires regional and international help to fill the gap in its inadequate resources and aspirations in fighting the Islamic terrorists.

International community should inspire the politicians and policy-makers of Bangladesh to mobilize maximum efforts and resources at its disposal to create a home-grown popular movement against the culture of violence and fear: it must be a people’s movement against Islamic terrorism for securing peace, prosperity and justice.

To avoid a Afghanistan-like scenario, Bangladesh must learn from Afghanistan's sufferings from Islamic Jihadism and her experience of fighting the menace. Because of the mobile and elastic nature of the threat, it will also require mutual cooperation from countries of the region: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Such an initiative will be central in stamping out the surging Jihadi threats not only to Afghanistan and Bangladesh, but also to the entire region to herald it as a zone of stability, peace and security, instead of as a zone of Jihadi threat to the world.

William Gomes is an independent human rights activist and a political analyst. He can be reached at cda.exe@gmail.com.

Rohingyas trained in different Al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan

Created 2009-04-01 00:46

By William Gomes - Bangladesh

Bangladesh is terrorized by Islamic terrorism. Islamic terrorism has created a culture of fear in Bangladesh. Our main objective is to bring out the nation from this culture of fear. Afghanistan is noted with the notion that "a nation at war and some time a nation engulfed by the "Taliban".

In 1990s, 70,000 to 120,000 Muslim youth trained to fight in Asia, Africa, and in Middle East in different Al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda highly trained a notable number of Islamic groups and indoctrinated them with the mission of "Jihad" that influx all over the world the message of fear and violence.

Arakan Rohingya Nationalist Organization (ARNO) and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) were among the groups who were trained in Afghanistan camps and were and are active in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Every single Islamic terrorist attack from 9/11 to Bangladesh or else where in world is direct or indirect curse of the mushroom growth of Islamic terrorism. Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami-Bangladesh (HuJI-B) and Jamaat-ul-Mujaihdeen Bangladesh (JMB) have had a strong relation with the Afghanistan based Islamic terrorist networks. Bangladesh witnessed a mass bloodshed in the name of bloody Islam. Roads of Bangladesh were shacked with the slogan “We are Taliban and Bangla Will be Afghan”.

Bangladesh is experiencing the highest challenge in controlling political Islam and Islamic terrorism. The scenario has changed now Bangladesh becomes the highest threat before world peace and security.

As a multifaceted phenomenon, terrorism is a reason to fight regionally and jointly. The experience of Afghanistan in fighting the Islamic terrorism has been pivotal. Afghanistan can lead the south Asia in fighting the Islamic terrorism with their all experience.

Present Afghanistan Government and the people of Afghanistan is major ally of the International community in fighting the Islamic terrorist. The articulation and pursuit of Afghan foreign policy had made it clear the intention and ability to defend the Islamic Terrorism in or by Afghanistan. However, in a world of diversity, the solution we are looking forward to bring an end to the culture of fear and violence does demand a regional united effort.

International community should guide to bridge the gap between inadequate aspirations of Afghanistan’s foreign policy in fighting the Islamic Terrorist with People and government of Bangladesh based on the spirit of friendship and co operation.

International community should inspire the politicians and policy makers to mobilize the people of the south Asian region to make an open platform that the normal people can lead the movement against the culture of violence and fear that the movements become people’s movement against Islamic Terrorism and a vibrant campaign for Justice and peace. This initiative will play a central role in helping the people and government of Afghanistan and Bangladesh in their mission towards insuring stability of the south Asian region and the world.

William Gomes is an independent human rights activist, a Catholic ecumenical activist, and a political analyst. He is also the Executive Director of the Christian Development Alternative (CDA), a national organization against torture and human rights violations.

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